Posts

Posted on

Taro in the Levant

I was reminded during a recent trip back to Cyprus (my first visit in 20 years after living there for quite a while) of the curious fact that taro is a staple of traditional Cypriot cuisine, something of an outlier in the Mediterranean. Called kolokassi, the tuber is prepared in a number of ways, and the young offshoots, or suckers, are also taken fried. You can see these in the photo, labelled “poulles.”. Peter J. Matthews has this to say in his “Genetic Diversity in Taro, and the Preservation of Culinary Knowledge“:

In Cyprus only one cultivar of taro is grown, but there are at least nine distinct ways of preparing taro (skhara, vrasto, souppa skourdalia, tiganites, kappamas, yiakhni, psito, moussakas, Matthews 1998a) (Figure 4). The fermentation of taro starch, and the edibility of leaves (petioles and blades) are not known in Cyprus. All the methods recorded use heat to reduce acridity — by simmering, boiling, stewing, frying, roasting, grilling, and baking (steaming was not reported). For each named dish, the details of preparation varied from person to person and village to village. The range of dishes is not large, compared to the range in Japan (Matthews 1995), but does involve a greater range of methods for applying heat.

You can find out more in the book “The Global Diversity of Taro: Ethnobotany and Conservation,” in which Dr Matthews has also had a hand. Poulles are not mentioned, which makes me think their consumption may be a relatively recent innovation.

It’s not clear where that one Cypriot cultivar may have come from, though Matthews says that the crop “is likely to have reached Cyprus in ancient times from India or Africa, via the Levant or Egypt.” That makes sense, but will be difficult to verify, as there is precious little in the way of germplasm collections in the region between Europe and India. I would imagine Egypt in particular would be fertile territory for a bit of collecting. I wasn’t able to find any ancient Egyptians representations of the plant, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they exist.

Posted on

Ex-pat wasabi flourishing

Luigi’s indefatigable quest for all the truth there is to be had about wasabi (Wasabia japonica) reminded me that long ago and far away, I entertained thoughts of growing the stuff commercially. Luigi alluded to the reason when he said “there is imitation wasabi on the market”. Amen to that. In fact, there’s almost nothing else on the market. Practically all the wasabi you, a mere mortal, are ever likely to try outside Japan (and much inside) is the wrong stuff. The right stuff commands a hefty price tag, the reason I was entertaining those thoughts to begin with. A little digging, however, persuaded me that the plant was far too persnickety and capital intensive to be worthwhile, so I gave up on it. Silly me.

Turns out wasabi is not nearly as hard to grow as people imagine. Richters, a reliable seed company that supplies the plants, says

[W]asabi will grow quite happily in any moist, organic-rich soil where there is shade and protection from the summer heat; running water is not required. After 18-24 months the rhizomes are harvested, washed, peeled and grated for fresh use.

Nothing there about no sharkskin.

Companies in the US and New Zealand are apparently making a decent fist of growing it on a commercial scale. At which point, I nearly gave up on wasabi again. But one more Google brought me to a suitably gushing piece in The Daily Telegraph less than a month ago. Talk about the wasabi zeitgeist! That too pushes the “wasabi is really difficult” trope, and more power to the plucky lads at The Watercress Company who pulled it off. Now to see whether I can get some of the real thing for a proper taste test.

No point trying to grow it here. Like watercress, which I miss terribly at times, the need to stay cool in summer probably dooms it. I expect it would do OK in northern Germany.

Posted on

The relationships among food plants

…I wasn’t able to find out if Wasabia and Armoracia are much related, though I doubt it.

No doubt I gave up too easily, something else I probably wouldn’t do now, like alliterate post titles and neglect to search for ex situ holdings. Anyway, the paper Toward a Global Phylogeny of the Brassicaceae 1, which came out a few months before that 2006 blog post on mine on wasabi which I have been revisiting, clearly relegates Eutrema (aka Wasabia) and Armoracia to quite distinct clades of the Brassicaceae (click on the phylogenetic diagram to see for yourself). Thanks to Ruaraidh for tracking that down. Not least because it gives me a chance to also link to yesterday’s post at The Botanist in the Kitchen on the phylogenetic tree of food plants in general, and nevermind that it doesn’t seem to feature wasabi.

Posted on

Where is wasabi?

That Nibble yesterday about the BEGIN Japanology TV programme on roots and tubers led to some more digging around, as it were, and eventually I unearthed this gem on wasabi.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qq30ya3ui4

Which reminded me that one of my early posts on this blog was about Wasabia japonica. What’s strange about that old post 2 is that six years on I can’t imagine writing something like that without including a link to a WIEWS report on how many genebank accessions there are of the crop around the world. And I’m not entirely sure that’s a good thing. Anyway, two, as is happens, and not where you’d think. There. I feel better now.

Posted on

Polymotu in practice

On the small islands of the Pacific, it is proposed for the planting of only three coconut varieties: a ‘green tall’ such as niu afa, ‘Malayan red dwarf’, and ‘Tahiti red dwarf’. Subsequently, six new varieties will be produced from this mix without any costly controlled pollination programme. And, farmers will have a diversity of coconut varieties to choose from. It is important to spend time with the people living on the islands to identify existing varieties and to progressively remove existing coconuts once the new palms begin to bear. This is a collective decision that village authorities need to agree on. The long-term benefits are continued biodiversity.

You may remember that from a piece from the Secretariat of the Pacific Community that I think we may have Nibbled, or worse, a couple of years back. Anyway, if that’s the theory, here’s the practice:

“We are not making a coconut plantation, we are landscaping an island, so the important thing is to make it pretty.”

That’s Dr Roland Bourdeix, starting about 4:20 mins in. 3 It’s his idea to plant small Pacific islands to just one or two coconut varieties, rather than bringing lots of different varieties together in a genebank. In what he calls the Polymotu Approach to coconut conservation, you let the coconuts themselves — and isolation — do the hard work of controlled pollination. The coconut conservationist just gets to travel from isolated island paradise to isolated island paradise, making sure that everything is ok, taking the odd measurement, and packing up coconuts for shipment when someone else somewhere else in the world wants that particular accession. Nice gig if you can get it.